How much is too much real estate in your portfolio‪?‬ The SFR Show

A common refrain in the investment world is, diversify your portfolio. But many real estate investors have a massive majority of their net worth in property. In this episode, Michael shares his thoughts on portfolio diversification and why he is so heavily focused on rental property.
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Transcript
Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.
 
Pierre:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Remote Real Estate Investor. My name is Pierre Carrillo and today I am joined by…
 
Michael:
Michael Albaum
 
Pierre:
and today we are going to talk about portfolio diversification, so let's just jump right in.
Hey, Michael.
 
Michael:
How's it going Pierre?
 
Pierre:
So Michael, one of the basic pieces of investment advice that I hear everywhere is diversification, diversification, diversify, don't be too consolidated. Because if any one piece of the market goes down, you're going to be left exposed somewhere. I remember you saying in a previous episode, that you're about 80-85% in real estate, and that made me think, wow, that's heavily consolidated. How do you find, how do you find comfort in being so consolidated in one asset class?
 
Michael:
Yeah, it's a really good question, Pierre and I think, for me, my strategy has changed over the 10 plus years that I've been investing and so for me, I was very focused on single family when I first got started and I think a lot of people do kind of find their niche inside of single family investing and it's funny because there's this, there's kind of two camps. There's one that says, diversify, diversify, diversify and then another one says, get rich in your niche and niche down and pick one thing to do and do it really well and if you can do it really well, you don't really need diversification. Diversification is for people that maybe aren't able to niche down or pick one thing or particular that they're passionate about, or really good at. So for me, I was always thinking about single families. I wanted to purchase a bunch of them, I wanted to own a bunch and I thought that was great and at the end of the day, and we've talked about it on prior episodes, the like I think what people are always scared about is their value decreasing, given some event or over time and that's when people talk about, like the S&P 500 index funds, you have a bunch of different companies.
 
And so if one goes out of business, you're not only holding that stock and so that is usually because the value can evaporate and unless the stock is paying some kind of dividend, or it's paying some kind of yeah, I guess that's what stocks dividends, the value of the stock is really in the value and hopefully it goes up over time. With rental real estate, we've got kind of a two headed play here. One is like a yield play a cashflow play, that pays us every single month and every single year and then the other is the appreciation, which is congruent, or synonymous with the stock value going up over time and so again, I'm really less concerned with the value of the property over time, because given a long enough time horizon, I'm comfortable, that thing is going up into the right. But even in the event of a downturn where the value is decreased, I've got yearlong leases and so the rent that I'm going to be collecting is likely going to be unaffected and unchanged. So for that reason, I was really comfortable getting very involved in the single family asset class. The other thing to think about is, I think real estate is this big, all-encompassing umbrella, if you will, it catches a lot of things, and a lot of dif